human-computer interaction

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

Robert Wills of TNMoC explains the Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, then walks through the Apollo 11 landing procedure step by step, including the 1202 alarms.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

A 73-minute Stanford talk by Robert Sapolsky drawn from his book Behave. It surveys the biological factors behind human behavior at its best and worst.

The first lecture of MIT 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science, taught by Tom Leighton, introducing mathematical proofs. It covers propositions, implication and basic proof methods.

A recording of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment. He walks through a list of cognitive biases such as incentives, social proof, and overoptimism.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS231n course on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition. It surveys the history and key challenges of computer vision, from the Cambrian explosion and Hubel and Wiesel to ImageNet.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

Geoffrey Hinton's 2025 Royal Institution Discourse on what AI has learned from biological intelligence and how it might surpass it. He explains neural networks and argues that human language use resembles what backpropagation-trained networks do.

A UC Berkeley CS 161 lecture by Nicholas Weaver on cryptocurrency and blockchains, covering how they work and the case against them. It is aimed at a computer security course audience.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

Hennessy and Patterson's 2018 Turing Award lecture at ISCA, A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. It covers domain-specific hardware, security, open instruction sets and agile chip development.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

A short clip of Robert Sapolsky on how social hierarchy generates chronic stress, drawing on baboon research. It links rank-related stress to heart health and life expectancy.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

A 2012 lecture by Richard Stallman at Reykjavik University arguing that copyright, built for the printing press, fits poorly with computer networks. He criticizes draconian enforcement and corporate lobbying.

A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.

A SIGGRAPH 2019 course on geometric algebra. Charles Gunn gives an intro, then Steven De Keninck gives a programmer-focused course with live examples in ganja.js.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

Sacha Arnoud, Waymo's Director of Engineering, gives a lecture in MIT's 2018 deep learning for self-driving cars course on the rise of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. It covers how Waymo uses deep learning and how it handles tricky driving situations.

Part one of an American Airlines training video presented by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on automation dependency. It grew out of a program on wake turbulence avoidance, and this restored version has the audio cleaned up.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

Scott Aaronson's Harvard CMSA talk traces what mathematical truths are knowable, from Godel and Turing to the Busy Beaver function. He covers recent work on Busy Beaver values.

Peter Norvig's UBC distinguished lecture on how massive amounts of simple data, such as for language modeling, can yield understanding that hand-built models could not.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

The first lecture of MIT's 6.001 (SICP) with Abelson and Sussman, giving an overview of the course and an introduction to Lisp. It argues that computer science is about managing complexity and abstraction, not computers.

Douglas Crockford's first Yahoo lecture puts JavaScript in historical context. He traces the language's structure and quirks back through the early decades of computer science and programming language history.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

Simon Peyton Jones gives Churchill College's annual computer science lecture on Haskell's birth and evolution. He covers the most influential ideas, from laziness to monads and type system evolution, plus current developments and guesses about the future.

Michael Sugrue's lecture on Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and the Stoic ideal, covering the text and its philosophy. It is one of his humanities lectures known for their clarity.